The Midnight Oil Band Above / Featuring the ASM Hydrasynth Explorer on Left

McCoy Tyner / Inner Voices album “For Tomorrow”

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John Fraim

A good part of my life has been consumed full time with a marketing and advertising career. But my daytime career has always competed with my love for art and creativity. With the fact I have always really been an artist in life more than anything else. But not one type of artist. A number of different types. All important. I call them muses and this seems the perfect word for these various types of art that come with the power of a great storm yet they always just a little beyond reach it seems. The Oxford Dictionary defines muse as “a person or personified force who is the source of inspiration for a creative artist.”

My various artistic muses came and their type of art was the source of inspiration for me during periods of time. seldom like to share my attention with another muse. In effect, one of these art muses will dominate a part of my life until it is replaced by another muse. There is almost always Writing in my life, the one constant, always there. Perhaps to simply report on the coming and going of the other muses? The others do come and go in their domination over certain period of my life. Music might consume my attention and creative efforts in one period. Photography in another. Film and Dioramas in other periods.

Writing was the fits muse to appear. I started writing stories in the 3rd grade. I stayed after all the other kids in the class had turned in the last assignment to write a short story in class. I think I always loved music and started creating it when I started playing a small spinet piano in our living room. I was fortunate to listen to music on the great stereo system my father set up and heard much big band music and jazz on it. And after school, a few friends would often drop our house and I’d put records everyone wanted to hear on dad’s stereo. The 45 “The Peppermint Twist” sounded great. Photography came over me fooling around with cameras and lighting effect over the years. Films and screenwriting were always there as I grew up in LA and a number of my parent’s friends were in the film business. And the last muse of making dioramas comes from my lifelong love of creating things with my hands as well as making sarcastic comments of life. Somewhat like a standup comic in diorama form.

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It’s not so easy as the above might suggest though. There is seldom complete dominance of a particular one of these artistic muse. Often, there is that certain power of inspiring me in a particular direction in art. Not a certain content within one of the arts. Rather, a particular context of the overall muse for all of at art. If some persona for this in fact exists.

One of the More Active Periods for the Midnight Oil Studios Band

I’ve had my Hydrasynth Explorer hooked up to just my 24 track Tascam Studio and Vocoder. All my other synthesizers and keyboards remain in the basement as I decided to familiarize myself with the incredible ASM Hydrasynth in the past few weeks up here in the office. Just attached a Zoom Vocoder V3 with an Audio Technica A22 Microphone attached to two KRK speakers.

Fooling around tonight recording in three tracks so far. Interestingly, using the Keyboard patch called Stereo Lab. I know the band well as my son Christopher introduced me to me in the 90s and I followed them for years. Is it more than coincidental that this particular patch played in the song I created on the Tascam tonight uses the AO 73 patch on the Hydrasynth called Stereo Lab? Music all over the place with me testing the Zoom V3 and playing the Hydrasynth over the same keynotes as the keyboard in the background plays over the background beats and the voices.

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A welcome back, then, to the muse of Music if you’re coming back with this piece of music I am creating tonight. I experiment with the V3 voice machine and learn how to use it better. I just brought it up from the basement this evening and hooked it all up. I wonder what prompted me to go down to the basement this evening after dinner and rescue it from the other musical instruments and hook it up to my system? This question by itself is something that can (should?) be thought about for a little while. At least to obtain any real type of insights into life and the process of creativity and art and the time elements of synchronicity serendipity?) in life.

You’re a tricky muse, though. When I think I know something about you, it turns out to really be nothing at all. I doubt anyone can ever know much about you. After all, you are meant to inspire me to start music again. You’e come and gone a lot over the years in my life. The bands in high school I was in. Playing the big Yamaha Grand on stage in the Chinese restaurant in Bellefontaine, Ohio in the late 80s up until the mid-90s.

Over the years, have collected synthesizers like others have collected golf equipment or model trains or something else. It’s not unusual my playing with my Korg keyboards has always come and gone over the years. In the last 8 years in our present house this meant they came up from the basement to my office or they remained in the basement. I set the entire family of instruments all at one time on a large table in our basement. Maybe 10 different Korg synthesizers and other sound making products.

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But the last few months have been different. When I got the Hydrasynth, I knew that this was a different keyboard using a technology I had never heard before from a keyboard. And the control over the sound was easy and yet infinite in possibilities. I kept telling myself I was going to read the 80 page manual for it. I had already read a few sections and was a lot easier to understand than anything written by other digital music makers. Maybe I will get to reading the manual for this amazing little music making beast but now, simply having too much fun just exploring what it can do. I think calling it the secondary product name as Explorer is a great name to create Hydrasynth Explorer. More than any other musical instrument I’ve ever played, it truly is the first music making machine that opens music exploration to everyone and not just the digital music nerds.

Now, the Midnight Oil Band is at its smallest. Again. A minimalistic set-up compared to others in the past. I think the greatest set-up was when my recording studio took over most of my apartment around 2005 – 2010. When I was separated and living in Grandview, Ohio. Over the years, I’ve had different set-ups of my instruments and recorded things with the set-ups. Always, though, after a while, I get tired of the music equipment in my office as I have stopped using it. I take it back down to the basement.

Now, its somewhat different with just the one synthesizer. It’s wonderful to be back into music again. And, it’s wonderful to be working with just one instrument, one keyboard again. It started this way for me in music. Just me and a keyboard and nothing else. Maybe it’s like this for others who, more than they love music, need to make it, create it. Shape it. Explore it. Through an outside instrument. Or the inside instrument of voice.

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This new period of music is different from that period of music. It was more of a maximalist period and now it is more minimalist period for creating music. Avoiding the temptation to hook up all my sound making devices stored in the basement.

Anyway, will load up some of this current music from the Midnight Oil Studios Band. Followers of Midnight Oil have heard our music on a number of posts. As well as this post made on April of 2021, during the Pandemic to our Music Page (listed above on this site). The photo above is from another post to Midnight Oil and an opposite music time for me in that it seemed like this was more maximalist than my current minimalist approach to music.

But the amazing ASN Hydrasynth Explorer allows for this. In a strange way, it seems somewhat like a new version of that old Cable Nelson piano in our living room. A type of older boy & dog story much like the first boy & dog stories of youth. The keyboard I learned to play on. The one I taught myself how to play. As I collected synthesizers and other music instruments (mostly from Korg) I sometimes set up like the photo above. But the headline photo is what I have right now. Just the Explorer synthesizer. A modern appearance of the old Cable Nelson piano I learned to play on?

(To the great Ray Bradbury biographer and scholar and friend Jonathan Eller I had the pleasure of recently meeting and having a wonderful discussion about Bradbury. Jonathan, wouldn’t Bradbury have found something in the connection between an old music instrument and a new one. I’m sure he probably has written a few stories about this.)

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About John.

The symbolism of this piece about what’s been happening with artistic muses over the years has correspondence or synchronicity with other emotions that come over people, groups of people, even nations of people. Perhaps even more than nations. These thoughts are pursued in the follow-up post to this one, “Keeping a Record.”